San Francisco Rush 2049 (and Hydro Thunder)

The Game Room
1

I was playing Need For Speed: Undercover again on my iPhone, when I realized that something I really missed was shortcuts. There aren’t any in the game.

Then I realized that the game that had a bunch of badass shortcuts wasn’t a NFS title at all it was San Francisco Rush 2049, so that led to me searching and discovering that the reason I haven’t seen a new game in the franchise is that the franchise is (apparently) dead.

WTF?

I played it in the arcade, where it was decent, but kind of expensive. But when it came out on the Dreamcast, along with Hydro Thunder, I played both maniacally. I knew every shortcut, knew how to hit every ramp with wings out to do fancy tricks, and just generally had a great time playing it over and over and over.

So why doesn’t some smart gaming company resurrect this franchise?

Also, why didn’t Demolition Racer: No Exit get another entry? That game was freaking fantastic!

2

For the record, I love all of those games. Lots of good times have been had with them.

3

San Francisco Rush 2049 was the game where you could extend wings and control your car during a jump to a certain extent, right? That was fun.

This article may be of interest to you. Apparently there were other games in the series for PS2, N64, XBox, and PC.

4

Aye, the other games were decent racing games, and had the shortcuts, but it was only the SF Rush 2049 home versions that featured wings.

I like my NFS games a lot; I get lots of replay out of them, and the minigames are terrific, but I miss the pure adrenalin of SF Rush 2049 (and FFX Racer, for that matter). And I miss the thrill of finding the shortcuts in SF Rush 2049. Some of them were long enough to be a valid part of the course, not just a cut-through to another part of the track.

5

I loved Rush on the Dreamcast. The multiplayer battle mode was just awesome. Hydro Thunder on DC was also great, but with 1 horrible flaw which made it worthless for multi players: if one player had a poor race, it would hand-of-god them along to make it a photo finish every time. It was such a shame they made it do that.